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Thursday, January 29, 2015

`You'll Find Very Interesting Things'

Lists
of recommended books can be gifts or rubbish, depending on the author of the
list. Bad taste, limited reading and enthrallment to fashion are fatal flaws. But
a reader can rely on a good, inspired list-maker to introduce him to new titles
and reanimate old ones. I’ve just read The
Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House
(Brookings Institution Press, 2015) by Stephen Hess, who served on the White
House staffs of Eisenhower and Nixon, and later advised Ford and Carter. Hess
begins his story winningly: “I am the only person—perhaps in the world—who was
a friend of both Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan before they knew
each other.” Early in his first term,
Nixon named Moynihan – a liberal Harvard professor with close ties to the
Kennedys – his urban affairs adviser. Hess calls them “the oddest. . . of all
the odd couples in American political life.”

In
a chapter titled “Tutorial,” Hess reports the president asked Moynihan for a
list of his favorite political biographies, and quotes Nixon as writing in a
memo to Moynihan: “As you know, I do quite a bit of evening reading, and I want
to be sure that I’m reading the best!” One is touched by Nixon’s earnestness and
eagerness to please his staff intellectual. Limiting himself to ten titles,
Moynihan leaves out Erik Erikson on Gandhi, Arthur Link on Woodrow Wilson
and Catherine Drinker Bowen on Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here is the list Moynihan
gives Nixon:

Autobiography, John Adams (1802)

Abraham Lincoln, Lord Charnwood (1917)

The Education of Henry
Adams,
Henry Adams (1918)

Talleyrand, Duff Cooper (1932)

Melbourne, David Cecil (1939)

Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock (1952)

The Republican Roosevelt, John Morton Blum
(1961)

Alexander Hamilton and
the Constitution,
Clinton Rossiter (1964)

Disraeli, Robert Blake (1966)

Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution,
John Womack Jr. (1969)

I’m
humbled, having read only seven of these books, and only one of them (Henry
Adams) more than once, though I’ve already borrowed Cecil’s Melbourne from the library. Moynihan
annotates each suggestion. About Charnwood’s Lincoln he writes, “For my money still the best volume on Lincoln,”
and on the Henry Adams volume: “I suppose this may be the great American book.
Surely it is an astoundingly perceptive account of our times, written decades
before they commenced.” Just the other day I returned to a beautiful passage in
the first chapter of Adams’ Education
that begins:

“Winter
and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures. Winter
was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license. Whether the
children rolled in the grass, or waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean,
or sailed in the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in
the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or chased
muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the
autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual living, while winter was
always compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature; winter was
school.”

Hess
reproduces Nixon’s reaction to Moynihan’s list, taken from notes kept by
William Safire:

“Pat
Moynihan is somewhat my mentor in telling me what I should read. He doesn’t
think I am too well educated, so as a result, a while back he sent me a group
of books to read. What surprised him was that I read them. . . .You wake up
late at night—1:00-2:00—and then for two or three hours you read. . . .I would
urge you some time to, when you wake up in the middle of the night as I do, to
pick up Cecil’s Melbourne or maybe Blake’s Disraeli and read it. You’ll find
very interesting things. You think we have problems. You should read about the
problems in nineteenth-century England!”

As
a human being, as a man amply filled with contradictions, Nixon is, with
Lincoln, our most endlessly interesting president, in part because his
flawed sensibility is often so like our own. In regard to Moynihan, I defer to Joseph Epstein:

“With
the exception only of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom I knew slightly, there has
not been a single member of either body of the United States Congress during
the past half century whose company I should want even for the duration of a
cup of coffee.”